Friday, June 24, 2011

Western Washington Quilt Shop Hop 2011

It has been a busy week around here. Didn't spend much time in the house though. Monday I had a number of errands to do but I spent a little time out in the berry garden first. Tuesday I spent the whole day outside working and then it was craft night.

My niece, Katie arrived in time for craft night and in the morning we headed out bright and early to start our shop hop road trip. We made it to 17 stores before closing time at 8 pm and then drove a couple of hours back home. Yesterday we headed out again to be at our first shop at 9 am when they opened and made it to 20 stores before closing time. Thank God for GPS to help us find all the shops without too much trouble.

We made a few purchases on our travels. We each bought a couple of paper piecing patterns from one shop. They are from MH Quilt Designs. We also bought some fat quarters. But if you want to make it to around 20 stores in a day you can't dawdle!

We were still frustrated by some of the blocks we got from the various stores. Not sure what some of the store owners are thinking when they design them!

We saw several quilts we thought were pretty cool. One was an awesome applique quilt but I held back from buying the pattern since it is all hand work and I have so many hand projects waiting for completion. Though I am thinking I will order it because it is just too hard to resist!

Another quilt we saw is called Geese Atop Your Cabin at Gee-Gee's Quilt Shop in Yelm. Katie and I both saw it when we used the restroom at the store! When we got out to the car I asked Katie if she had seen it and she had so she pulled out her graph paper and colored pencils and drew a block so we wouldn't forget it. Today we decided to make one or two blocks to try a couple of color combinations. I sewed and she pressed and trimmed and here is what we came up with:

As you can see in the last picture the triangles are just folded squares that are caught in the seams. I am pretty sure there will be several of these quilts in my future. Probably the first will be using up some of my 1.5" strips and using either black or white for the centers or triangles. After that will probably be a black and white quilt with various bright colored triangles and centers.